Getting Out the Vote for Abigail Spanberger in Purple Virginia

At this point, Virginia is reliably blue in statewide races, but change has been slower at the district level—and Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic candidate for the House, seems to know it.

Photograph By Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Virginia’s Seventh District is not, geographically speaking, part of Middle America, but it is in Virginia’s own heartland—a strip running through the center of the state, east of Charlottesville, at the top, and west of Richmond, at the bottom. The politics of its middle-class suburbs resemble those of suburbs throughout the country. Twenty years ago, or even ten, that might have made the Seventh Republican territory. While the district went for Trump by about six points, in 2016, that is no longer the case. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and former C.I.A. officer, is tied in the polls with the incumbent, Dave Brat, a former Randolph-Macon College economics professor who, in 2014, beat the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in one of the Tea Party’s last high-profile primary wins.

Now, though, when faced with the national Republican Party, suburbanites across the country are balking. An NPR/Marist poll found, in September, that fifty-three per cent of suburban voters nationwide “strongly disapprove” of President Trump’s performance and that sixty-one per cent preferred Democratic midterm candidates to Republicans. Trump is only part of the story. Republicans have failed to win a majority of the suburban vote in three straight elections—a collapse in support that has already upended politics in Virginia. At this point, the state is reliably blue in statewide races. Many expected last year’s election to replace Governor Terry McAuliffe to be close, but the Democratic candidate, Ralph Northam, beat the Republican, Ed Gillespie, by nearly nine points. In this year’s Senate race, a September poll showed the Democratic incumbent, Tim Kaine, leading his far-right challenger, Corey Stewart, by sixteen points.

Change has been slower at the House-district level, and Spanberger seems to know it, putting her national-security credentials front and center in her campaign literature. One flyer features pictures of her standing next to the former C.I.A. and N.S.A. director Michael Hayden and training at a firing range. In the first debate between the two candidates, Brat has tried to tie Spanberger to the national Democratic leadership, telling the audience that a vote for Spanberger would be a vote “for the Nancy Pelosi liberal agenda.” He asked, “Do you want to turn Richmond into San Francisco?” Spanberger’s exasperated and forceful rebuttal has since gone viral. “I am a woman who grew up in Henrico County, who grew up in this community, who was taught service, hard work, and a commitment to the belief that the American people can be anything and we will lead the way in this world, and that’s who I am,” she said. “I want to serve this community; it’s the community that made me who I am, and I ask for your vote on November the 6th. Abigail Spanberger is my name!” The crowd roared.

At a Spanberger campaign rally at James River High School, in Chesterfield County, on Monday night, Susan Swecker, the folksy chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, crowed about Spanberger’s debate performance. “Excuse me, kids,” she said with a grin, “but she did kick his butt.”

Spanberger, who spent the hour or so before the event cheerily posing for photos and kissing babies, took the stage energetically. “This is awesome,” she said, to the crowd of a couple of hundred people, which included many parents and young children.

“In 2016, in the leadup to that election, my kid’s school, in Henrico County, made a rule that they weren’t allowed to talk about politics in school, because when they were talking about politics at school there was usually a child crying or upset or there was a fight,” Spanberger began. “That, to me, is just horrible. It runs counter to who we are as Americans. It runs counter to what it is we’re supposed to instill in our children, the way we teach our children that they can disagree and have conversations.”

She went on to say that, although the rule is still in place, one of her daughters has worn her campaign button to school. “My middle daughter slapped one on her backpack and started to leave for the bus stop,” she told the crowd. “And my oldest daughter said, ‘Charlotte, you can’t have a button. It’s politics. You can’t have politics at school.’ And my middle daughter said, ‘It’s not politics—it’s my name.’ ”

“It’s not politics,” she continued, “It’s personal and it is all personal. Health care is personal. The ability to provide the prescription drugs that our kids or ourselves need—that’s personal. The idea to trust that our kids can go to a strong school and exit, graduate—ready to enter the workforce, the military, an apprenticeship program, or a university—is personal. The fact that there are people across this country who cannot drink the water that comes out of their taps is personal. The fact that there are people who are afraid to send their kids to school because of some of the horrific things we see on TV—that is personal. Let alone a place of worship, let alone a movie theater—that is personal.”

Two days after the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh, the threat of gun violence clearly weighed heavily on Spanberger’s supporters. Signs that read “Gun Sense Voter,” from the groups Everytown and Moms Demand Action, were everywhere in the crowd. At a cafeteria table, two middle-aged men chatted about Republican opposition to gun control.

“People don’t read the whole Second Amendment. It talks about a well-regulated militia!” one said.

Helen Fitch, a self-described independent, and one of the older people in the crowd, told me that she’s leaned increasingly Democratic since the 2000 election, and that she’s not sure that she’ll vote Republican again. “I don’t want to say that—and, if these Republicans showed that they were better than the Democrats, I would vote Republican. But I don’t see it happening,” she said. Fitch recalled learning in high school, at the time of the 1960 Presidential election, that Richard Nixon had nearly won the popular vote, but he nonetheless would have lost the election to John F. Kennedy. “That just blew my mind,” she said. “If this happens again and again, people won’t vote for President anymore.” Fitch, though, is a committed voter and told me that, in this election, she was for Spanberger.